Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg--as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals—the sack of Magdeburg; the Dutch revolt; the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus; the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly; and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict. By war’s end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country’s greatest disaster. An understanding of the Thirty Years War is essential to comprehending modern European history. Wilson’s masterful book will stand as the definitive account of this epic conflict. For a map of Central Europe in 1618, referenced on page XVI, please visit this book’s page on the Harvard University Press website.

The first edition of The Thirty Years' War offered an unrivalled survey of a central period in European history. Drawing on a huge body of source material from different languages and countries throughout Europe, it provided a clear and comprehensive narrative and analytical account of the subject. It has established itself as the classic text with reviewers, students and the general reader. This second edition has been thoroughly revised to include the very latest research. The updated bibliographical information provides an invaluable resource, synthesising the major work in the field, in all languages, up to 1996. Written with great clarity and liveliness, the book brings alive the period in all its aspects. It covers the horrors of the war and the contorted politics of the period. It deals with all the major figures, including Wallerstein and Richelieu, Gustavus Adolphus and Tilly, the Winter King and the Habsburg emperors. For range and depth of coverage there is no other work like it. It has become the definitive book on the subject.

A topical subject offering interesting parallels between the news revolution in the age of James I and Charles I and our internet age. An important contribution to the history of print and books. London's News Press shows that seventeenth-century England was very much part of a European-wide news community. The book presents a new print history that looks across Europe and the interconnecting political and religiousgroups with international networks. It tells the story of the printers and publishers engaged in the earliest, illicit publications, their sources and connections in Germany as well as the Netherlands, and traces the way legitimacy was achieved. These were the earliest printed periodical news publications. Periodicity and its implications for trade and customers is explored as well as the roles of publishers and editors. The period saw a much biggercirculation of news than had ever been experienced before. The book also describes the lively nature of relationships that ensued between news networkers (editors, writers and readers along their interconnecting chains). Thesubject is topical. Our understanding of reading and communications is undergoing major changes with the rise and proliferation of social media. James I and Charles I faced new media and an unprecedented growth in informed publicopinion fuelled by a flow of information that was essentially beyond the reach of government control. So there are parallels with the contemporary struggle to adapt, and there is a corresponding growth in the publication of history books reflecting upon the origins of the public sphere and the development of public opinion. JAYNE E. E. BOYS is an independent scholar who lives in Suffolk and British Columbia.

Explore the epic conflict and contrasting leadership styles of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, two titanic figures in the Thirty Years War whose strategic brilliance and dramatic deaths shaped the course of modern warfare, analyzed in vivid detail by the author. The conflict, personal rivalry and contrast in personality, generalship and command, between the two iconic commanders in the Thirty Years War, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden for the Protestant powers, and Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland. More than just commanders at the tactical level they were statesmen, military organizers and strategists on a continental scale. Both commanders represented the 17th-century ‘military revolution in action’. The writing is vivid, graphic and detailed, without overloading, and readers can feel ‘involved’ in the action, from strategic planning to battlefield tactics, and even the melee. Both generals are titanic figures come, and their respective deaths - Gustavus heroically in battle and Wallenstein, murdered with the Emperor’s compliance – were dramatic highpoints in the long war. This is no hagiography, and the author analyses the contrasting reputations of two of the greatest military figures in modern history and analyses mistakes as well their triumphs. Both commanders’ understanding of the role of the modern state and finance as vital factors in the military revolution and modern warfare. A major contrast was Gustavus’s constant search for the tactical and strategic initiative compared to Wallenstein’s caution and patience and development of counter-punch defensive tactics. Exceptional for the period, a young warrior like an ‘Alexander’, Gustavus excelled in inspired battlefield leadership even at huge risk. Despite his death at Lutzen in 1632, he and his steadfast chancellor Oxenstierna, had decisively defeated the Emperor’s attempt to subjugate the Empire and introduce the Catholic counter-reformation. Gustavus contributed hugely to the ending of Habsburg supremacy while advancing new concepts in modern war. His death ushered in his acolytes including generals Baner, Saxe-Weimar and Torstensson. Gustavus or Wallenstein, the greater of the two? The reader must judge but Napoleon included Gustavus in his list of ten greats with Julius Caesar, Hannibal Barca, and Alexander the Great.